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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Benjamin Schonthal, “Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of the Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
Description: In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specifically debates about law’s effects on religion, Schonthal challenges the widely-held idea that constitutional law, properly administered, is a useful tool for reducing conflict between and within religious communities.
Drawing on unpublished and previously unexamined archival materials written in Tamil, Sinhalese, and English, Sc...